[MissC]

I personally find it strange that people are seemingly using this forum more and more as a social-networking page. As someone mentioned earlier, posting just for the sake of posting it seems without anything really helpful to post.

That's not a problem with only this site; it's a problem with the internet.

Thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and others of their type, it's become trivially easy for idiots to spout nonsense to an audience the size of Earth. I'll probably have to follow this with "get off my lawn!" but the available content and quality of conversation were much better back in the days when you had to know some HTML and how to run an Apache web server if you wanted to be heard. Essentially, there were higher barriers to entry, which ensured that more literate and intelligent people made up more of the people who cleared those hurdles.

But when a 3-year-old can post a comment on Facebook, that's exactly where the intellectual level of the internet will go: to the lowest common denominator.

So, while I understand Doodlebug's lament, I'm afraid the horses are gone and it's too late to shut the barn door. The idiots outnumber the thoughtful, just as they always have, and they're not leaving the internet as long as big companies can sell them cheap media consumption devices with which a couple of finger pokes forever infects the world's data with stupidity.